The same thing that makes you a ton of money in husngs is the same thing that could potentially cripple your bankroll: the tendency of people to let mistakes compound in poker, and especially in heads up play. Heads up sngs by their very nature are very personal, and it’s pretty easy to go on tilt. You play so many hands, that bad beats aren’t just inevitable, they are pre-requisite. If you play with any sort of regularity or volume, then you will have to leave the past in the past and not bring it into your next match. Doing so will cause the mistakes to compound, and eventually one bad beat turns into 3-4 in succession.
Mistakes don’t have to be huge either to matter. Here an an example of how past results can effect your play:
25/50 blinds; effective stacks are 1,500. Opponent raises to 200 from the button. You mis-click and accidentally call with 4h7h from the big blind. The board comes 5h6hAs. Opponent bets 100.
Allowing the mistake to compound? You just call or fold because you mis-clicked pre-flop.
The flop now changes the hand completely and you have an open-ended straight flush draw. Though you made a mistake pre-flop, the bigger mistake would be to fold the flop and/or play the flop passively. Your best move now would be to raise with your hand, which is almost certainly ahead now, unless you opponent holds a set or two pair. Here are the pokerstove numbers crunched for your hand vs. AKoff:
3,516,268 games 1.818 secs 1,934,140 games/sec
Board: 6h 5h As
Dead:
Hand 0: 52.02% 1829248 { 7h4h }
Hand 1: 48.04% 1689183 { AdKh }
You can clearly see that after 3.5 million hands that your hand is favored to even the mighty big slick in this situation, so no matter what you have to raise this hand. Keeping the pot small just because you misclicked would be a mistake because when/if the draw hits, it’s going to be very hard to get paid. People are going to be wary when they bet and you just smooth call preflop. Raises look weaker than flat-calls sometimes, so naturally this is going to put your opponent on the defensive and cause them to search harder for reasons why you might have called them.
For another example of letting mistakes compound, look no further than the next example. 15/30 blinds; effective stacks 1,500; opponent is TAG. You limp with AdAh, and your opponent raises in the big blind to 90. You elect to just call. The flop comes: 7s8d9c. You check and your opponent bets 180 into a 180 pot. The action is on you and you decide to call.
The mistake? Well, there’s two of them arguably. First, your opponent is TAG and elected to raise pre-flop, so you should have actually limp-re-raised preflop, or just raised straight-up. Just calling a TAG player preflop is often a pretty big mistake because TAG players will often only continue unless they’ve connected with the board pretty significantly. This creates a situation where you are only going to get action if you’re beat postflop. If you had re-raised preflop, then the excuse for the action would be that your opponent might feel pot committed. However, since you elected to just call, your opponent is likely going to keep the pot small unless they’ve outflopped you. The second mistake is just calling the bet postflop as well. This is a spot where you are best suited to either raise or fold. A TAG opponent isn’t going to bet this flop without at least a draw, or a combination of some pair and a draw. Let’s take a look at how AA stacks up against a pair and a draw in this case:
1,446,351 games 0.747 secs 1,936,212 games/sec
Board: 7s 8d 9c
Dead:
Hand 0: 44.71% 646675 { Td9h }
Hand 1: 52.95% 765890 { AhAd }
As you can see, your hand is still ahead, but not by much. If you just call in this spot instead of raising, if a connected card hits, you’re going to be faced with one hell of a decision and may never forgive yourself for the rest of the night for not being able to see your opponents cards when they bet big. You’ll likely second guess yourself and wonder if there’s any way you could have played the hand better — but with good reason, because yes you could have: you could have raised at some point instead of playing those Aces right into the trash can.
There are countless number of other ways that you can let mistakes compound, including but not limited to:
- Calling too much instead of just raising or folding
- Drawing without proper odds, and playing draws straight forward
- Overvaluing top pair with moderate kickers
- Over protecting small pocket pairs
- CALLING shoves with draws instead of using the concept of fold equity
The key is to recognize the pattern and to stop it before things get too bad. My ability to do this is the reason why this graph is so important:
This is my winning/losing streaks graph. The X-axis is the length of streak. The Y-axis is the number of times it’s happened. The red bars are the losing streaks, and the blue bars are the winning streaks. What you’ll notice is that I actually have more 2 game losing streaks than 2 game winning streaks, however I have way more 3/4 game winning steaks than losing streaks. This also holds true for every other length of streak. This is because I don’t let mistakes compound.
